Here's the thing about the ETRSi: it's the camera that, almost by accident, kept Bronica's lights on. By the late 1980s the company had bet big on its expensive GS-1 6x7 system, which never became the hit they hoped for, while their pricier SQ line also cooled off. Meanwhile the humble, budget-friendly ETR/ETRS 645 cameras quietly outsold everything else and became the thing that, as one historian put it, kept Bronica afloat, just barely, while the company's fortunes cracked around it. The ETRSi, released in December 1988, was the last and most polished word in that lineage — the sixth and final 6x4.5 camera Bronica ever made, built on a second revision of the ETRS chassis, before the line was discontinued in December 2004 after a sixteen-year production run.
To understand why that matters, you have to go back to Zenzaburo Yoshino, a Tokyo rice merchant's son who got obsessed with cameras after World War II rationing forced him to diversify the family business. He spent eight years designing and building a camera nobody asked him to build, and in 1959 he unveiled the original Zenza Bronica — a 6x6 SLR that was explicitly built to outclass Hasselblad's own offerings. That DNA never left the brand: decades later, collectors and reviewers still nickname the whole ETR family the "poor man's Hasselblad," cameras that borrowed the modular, box-plus-back-plus-finder philosophy of the Swedish original but sold for a fraction of the price.
What made the ETRSi specifically the connoisseur's pick within that family is a short list of quietly serious upgrades: TTL/OTF flash metering, a proper mirror lock-up feature, locking dark slides, and improved ergonomics for changing lenses, layered onto a leaf-shutter system that runs from 8 seconds to 1/500th and syncs flash at every single shutter speed — something a focal-plane-shutter cameras simply can't do. It shoots fifteen 6x4.5cm frames per 120 roll, which is a real, tangible difference from a 6x6 camera's twelve, and the interchangeable back system means you can swap film stocks mid-roll without burning frames. None of this is flashy. All of it is exactly why working photographers reached for these bodies instead of babying them.
Collectors care about the ETRSi today for reasons that are almost the inverse of hype: it's the unglamorous workhorse that nonetheless carries real lens quality (the Zenzanon glass has its own devoted following) in a genuinely modular, still-serviceable system, at a moment when Bronica itself no longer exists to make more. Tamron folded the whole brand after buying it, and the last Bronica of any kind — the RF645 rangefinder — was discontinued in 2005, closing the book for good. That finality is part of the current market logic: one enthusiast tracked a complete ETRSi kit (body, finder, lens, back) that cost roughly $2,350 new in 2000, now trading for around $400-500 — a huge fall in absolute terms, but with used prices on individual bodies having crept back up over the past several years as film shooters rediscover the system. A clean body at $229.99 (Glass Hound find) sits comfortably under where these have been trading, for a camera that was, quite literally, the thing standing between Bronica and going out of business a decade before it eventually did anyway.